hmmm... i heard Ganador doesn't give credit for other people's work

I don't know the guy myself, but since he has been loudly blasting a project he's doing with a shitload of other people (I remember Xpray, Ice and Frenzee were mentioned), that seems an odd claim to make.

But hey, it wouldn't be the internet if people didn't make drama on it.

Wait... you can make Second Life avatars in 3d Studio Max or Maya? Please, tell me more!

It's through the miracle of Sculpties! A way of transfering a polygonal model made in 3ds max or Maya to Second Life! It IS somewhat limited, unfortunately - for one thing, you have to start from a sphere of specific subdivisions, and then do soft selection modeling to obtain a result. It means you also will need multiple sculpted parts to make a good avatar head, but fortunately even this will usually result in an avatar using far fewer total prims than before - and, more importantly, the sculpties will give an avatar a much more appealing appearance!

There are quite a few different utilities for making sculpted prims in many different 3d programs, the Second Life wiki should have more info for ya.

Ah, thats sounds like a pretty painful way to work. Have you seen Google's "Lively"? It looks lik it might be a lot more 3d artist friendly.

I've heard a few things about it, I may decide to check it out at some point when I have some free time.

And really, the SL sculptie method isn't as painful as you'd think. It's literally just sculpting an existing amount of stuff - rather like trying to sculpt in clay without adding or removing anything. It's not all THAT hard to do. I suspect it's done this way mostly because sculpties have had to be adapted to the already-existing tech of SL, and so had to conform to some specific requirements, which of course require somewhat more work than more traditional methods of modeling.

Still, it would be interesting to see what sort of tools "Lively" offers. I don't know how popular it might be with the furry set, though, especially if they don't allow any erotic or adult material onto their grid. Might be interesting for 3d artists to try out tho, if only to quickly make things for games, as it were.